Twitter complies with Germany's new hate-speech laws by cutting off the account of a satirical magazine that mocks hate speech

From the Boing Boing Shop

Follow Us

When a German neo-Nazi politician tweeted that German police were trying to "to appease the barbaric, Muslim, rapist hordes of men," her account was briefly suspended -- but when the satirical magazine Titanic put up its own tweet mocking the Nazi, their account was suspended, too.

Now, both the Nazi and the people who were making fun of her have to prove that they weren't engaged in hate-speech.

Germany's hate-speech law was only three days old when Titanic lost its account. The law provides for up to €50m in fines for businesses that don't expeditiously remove hate speech, and €5m in personal fines directed at individual employees who fail to remove hate speech within 24 hours.

These fines are as high as they are on the theory that it has to cost a company less to comply with the law than to ignore it. €50m buys a lot of human staff to monitor your service, or a lot of programmers to write hate-speech detection bots. But with the stakes this high, it's a given that businesses will develop hair-triggers and kill anything that might bring them under enforcement action, guaranteeing that the Nazi tuna-net is going to catch a hell of a lot of antifa dolphins.

Prior to the law's passage, free speech advocates warned that this would happen, and Angela Merkel personally promised it wouldn't. It only took three days for the first case to come to light.

The magazine's writers are shocked at this turn of events. They likely didn't expect an American social media company to be making judgment calls on speech ahead of German censors. Prosecutors are "examining" the politician's comments for possible illegality, but no one seems too eager to explain why Twitter nuked a satirical account as well. The Titanic's publishers say Chancellor Merkel herself promised writers the law wouldn't have this effect. But here we are, observing this exact effect in motion -- one completely expected by everyone asking their representatives for a better, more narrowly-crafted law.

Disney is being sued by the Michael Jackson estate for using fair-use clips in a biopic called "The Last Days of Michael Jackson" -- in its brief, the company decries "overzealous copyright holders" whose unwillingness to consider fair use harms "the right of free speech under the First Amendment."

The European Parliament has passed a resolution calling on the European Commission (the EU's civil service) to craft rules that will severely limit planned obsolescence in electronics by forcing manufacturers to design products to facilitate repair by third parties, extend first-part warranties, warrant and support software, label products with an estimate of their overall life-expectancy, […]

One of two teen boys who kicked and beat a Sikh man in Manteca, California, turned out to be a local police chief’s own son. Tyrone McAllister, 18, the son of Union City, California, police Chief Darryl McAllister, was one of the two arrested, police in the city of Manteca, California, said. The other suspect […]

Traveling isn’t always the most comfortable experience, but at least you have your music to keep you company on those long flights. That is, until your chatty neighbor and that crying baby three seats over drown out your playlist. These Paww WaveSound 3 Noise-Cancelling Bluetooth Headphones block up to 20 decibels of audio, so you can […]

SEO can be a fickle creature, but it can work in your favor—you just need the right tools. When it comes to getting your site on that coveted first page of Google, SERPstash Premium simplifies the process with 21 user-friendly tools designed to break down your page’s performance and show you where you can improve. Lifetime […]

Running a Shopify store is a great way to net some extra cash on the side or—if you really know what you’re doing—replace your 9-to-5 altogether. However, success doesn’t come naturally, and newcomers tend to receive mixed results when starting on their own. This E-Commerce Bootcamp can help start your Shopify venture off on the right […]